My computer programmer friends like to toss out this expression when told to hurry (or else more computer programmers will be hired to “help”): “It takes nine months to make a baby, no matter how many women you assign to the task.” (Fred Brooks said this in software engineering bible, The Mythical Man-Month).

Reader “Christine de Pizan”, who you’ll read more about on The Grindstone this Friday, is starting a fashion line and wrote to me asking whether she should quit her bartending job to focus full-time on fashion. She had over $50,000 in the bank, and had mapped out her worst-case scenario as recommended in Bullish Life: How to Reduce Your Stress Level Immediately. She was ready.

But it turns out:

I’m pretty neurotic and until I have a tangible product it’s pretty much a waiting game (as I am coordinating with a patternmaker and eventually a sample maker). If I sat around at home waiting for patterns/samples to be ready, which up to now has been quite a relentless process, I might worry myself into a coma. So I figure just make some money and stack some cash while I can.

Some people are just naturally cheerful, and some work at it. But do you ever watch one of those “motivational” videos wherein someone who is paralyzed from the chin down — and also has, for instance, feet growing out of their armpits — tells you they’re glad about all of this, because of Jesus? If it works for that person, great, but sometimes demanding that a person brainwash herself into being happy about something is just too fucking much.

I wrote in Bullish Life: Sometimes It’s Best Just to Not Think About It that there’s great power in mental discipline. Just decide what thoughts you will dismiss with casual disdain every time they pop into your head. Many religious people do this all the time — literally turning away at the sight of scantily clad women, and countering any sexual thoughts by immediately turning to silent prayer. I’m an atheist and I don’t have any problem with sexual fantasies, but I mention this because it’s got to be great practice for developing mental discipline in general.

For instance, if you are prone to body issues: I’m a fan of exercising, and then not looking at yourself naked in a mirror. Just don’t think about it. If you’re doing all the healthy things you should be, then you’re already succeeding — whatever you see in the mirror won’t change your course of action, so there’s no need to obsess over it.

Similarly, I am easily able to maintain the body type I want because I only stock my house with the things I should be eating, and I don’t think about eating when I’m by myself; I just make egg whites and vegetables and black beans the same way I brush my teeth. On autopilot. I see people obsessing on Facebook about how their diets won’t let them have brownies, and I think, “You’re just making it worse! Develop an obsession with something more important than food.”

“After taking so many hits on tests, I feel kind of shell-shocked. Just going into that room brings back so many bad memories. I have to work really hard not to think of that and instead to focus on the questions. It’s never easy. But you have to understand, I’m not one to give up.”
Work really hard not to think of that and instead focus on the questions. And then the next day, this popped up out of nowhere: “I seldom think about my limitations, and they never make me sad. Perhaps there is just a touch of yearning at times; but it is vague, like a breeze among flowers.”

Yep, that’s Helen Keller.

What can’t you have now? What must you wait for? What depends on the whims or finishing power of others? What can you do nothing about? Commit to dismissing those thoughts. They get two seconds in your head; you’ve heard them before. Move on.
Never wait full-time; waiting lends itself well to multitasking.

This also goes for suffering. Waiting and suffering are part of life, but you owe it to yourself not to let them mushroom over all of your available time. Everyone feels like shit sometimes, so just try to make it less time-consuming.

I’ve written before (in Bullish: How to [Intelligently] Do Many Different Things at Once) about how multitasking doesn’t work — except it does when one of the things you’re trying to do can run on autopilot. Waiting, pining, feeling sorry for yourself, or even experiencing genuine grief are all human activities that pretty much run on autopilot.

I wrote in Bullish: Picking a Boyfriend Who Doesn’t Hold Back Your Career or Bank Account that “it is now unavoidably obvious to me that I can do one very-high-concentration activity per day, first thing in the morning. After that, I can teach classes, I can give presentations, I can fold all my hand towels into the precise folding schema that reminds me of a high-end luxury hotel, but I can’t, for instance, write this column. I therefore studiously avoid early-morning meetings; I never waste my best timeslot on something that could easily be completed in an inferior timeslot.”

Waiting and sadness do not deserve your most productive timeslots. Your future self requires that you act. Whatever you-in-15-years is like, you can be pretty sure that she wants you to set her up with some cash, a nice place to live, thriving friendships, and a kickass career. Your future self deserves your kindness and attention now. (See also: Bullish Life: Breaking Free from Terrible Situations for more on setting up your future self.)

Enjoy now what will be lost when you get what you want.

No opportunity comes without some kind of loss. If you are Kristin Stewart, getting the part in Twilight was obviously a game changer, but came with a loss of the simple ability to go to the mall or sit in a coffee shop or, you know … go outside.

An entrepreneur friend of mine who does not have a paparazzi problem comments that, now that she’s so successful, she doesn’t have nearly as many good ideas anymore. Rather, she’s coasting on (and monetizing) ideas from back when she was broke. “Good ideas,” she says, “came from having a lot of free time on my hands.”

I’d like to have kids. In fact, it seems absurd that my main gift in life is explaining things, and no one around me needs help with forks and shoelaces; virtually everyone I know is fork-capable. And yet, having a child (whether I gestate it out myself or adopt it from an exciting foreign nation) would require me to move out of my beloved one-bedroom apartment and would obliterate my ability to plan these columns on scraps of paper while drinking Chimay in bars til all hours of the morning.

If you must wait to have the things you want, drink up all you can of the things that will later be lost. Unknown actresses can happily enjoy looking bloated in a bikini and not seeing their photos in a magazine with circles around their abdomens and arrows pointing to their purported “babies” (also known as “internal organs and having eaten a burrito”). Christine despises bartending, but she enjoys the security of knowing where her money is coming from (and maybe waking up late, having a built-in social system through work, or other intangibles).

Maybe this is worth an actual T-chart: when your goals are achieved, you will have the stuff on the left, but lose the stuff on the right.

Make a point to reflect and enjoy the stuff on the right. I’ve certainly had plenty of Chimay this week.

It’s okay to wait for the things we want. But there’s so much to be done while we do it.